How to programmatically get the number of fields of a struct?
It's possible when the struct itself is generated by the macros - in this case you can just count tokens passed into macros, as shown here. That's what I've come up with:
macro_rules! gen {
($name:ident {$($field:ident : $t:ty),+}) => {
struct $name { $($field: $t),+ }
impl $name {
fn field_count(&self) -> usize {
gen!(@count $($field),+)
}
}
};
(@count $t1:tt, $($t:tt),+) => { 1 + gen!(@count $($t),+) };
(@count $t:tt) => { 1 };
}
Playground (with some test cases)
The downside for this approach (one - there could be more) is that it's not trivial to add an attribute to this function - for example, to #[derive(...)]
something on it. Another approach would be to write the custom derive macros, but this is something that I can't speak about for now.
Are there any possible API like
field_count()
or is it only possible to get that via macros?
There is no such built-in API that would allow you to get this information at runtime. Rust does not have runtime reflection (see this question for more information). But it is indeed possible via proc-macros!
Note: proc-macros are different from "macro by example" (which is declared via macro_rules!
). The latter is not as powerful as proc-macros.
If this is achievable with macros, how should it be implemented?
(This is not an introduction into proc-macros; if the topic is completely new to you, first read an introduction elsewhere.)
In the proc-macro (for example a custom derive), you would somehow need to get the struct definition as TokenStream
. The de-facto solution to use a TokenStream
with Rust syntax is to parse it via syn
:
#[proc_macro_derive(FieldCount)]
pub fn derive_field_count(input: TokenStream) -> TokenStream {
let input = parse_macro_input!(input as ItemStruct);
// ...
}
The type of input
is ItemStruct
. As you can see, it has the field fields
of the type Fields
. On that field you can call iter()
to get an iterator over all fields of the struct, on which in turn you could call count()
:
let field_count = input.fields.iter().count();
Now you have what you want.
Maybe you want to add this field_count()
method to your type. You can do that via the custom derive (by using the quote
crate here):
let name = &input.ident;
let output = quote! {
impl #name {
pub fn field_count() -> usize {
#field_count
}
}
};
// Return output tokenstream
TokenStream::from(output)
Then, in your application, you can write:
#[derive(FieldCount)]
struct MyStruct {
first_field: i32,
second_field: String,
third_field: u16,
}
MyStruct::field_count(); // returns 3